Nation in brief

Clark will testify at trial of Milosevic

WASHINGTON - Retired Gen. Wesley Clark agreed to take a brief hiatus from his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to go to the Netherlands and testify at the U.N. war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Clark said Sunday that the chief prosecutor in the trial at The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, has asked him to appear in mid December to testify against the deposed Serb leader.

"Because of the historic importance of this proceeding - the first trial of a head of state before a war crimes tribunal - I have agreed to appear," Clark said in a statement.

He said the U.S. government has authorized his participation, and lawyers from the State Department and the Pentagon would accompany him.

His appearance at the trial raises the possibility that questions might arise about a 1994 meeting between Clark and a Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect could be resurrected at a sensitive time - just weeks before the start of the leadoff presidential contests.

As the former supreme commander of NATO, Clark led a 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 aimed at expelling Yugoslav forces involved in a bloody crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Clark also served as director of strategy, plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the mid 1990s when the United States was trying to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia.

Clark told NBC's Meet the Press that during his work for the Joint Chiefs and later as NATO commander, he spent dozens and dozens of hours in negotiations with Milosevic.

WASHINGTON - Sex offenders are less likely to be rearrested after their release from prison than other criminals, a government study released Sunday finds.

The Justice Department study of 9,691 men convicted of rape, sexual assault and child molestation who were released in 1994 found 43 percent were arrested for any type of crime within three years, compared with 68 percent for all other former inmates.

Ryan King, researcher at the Sentencing Project, suggested the difference may be because the most serious rapists, sexual assaulters and child molesters do not get released in the first place and are unable to commit more crimes. Those studied served an average of 31/2 years, indicating they had committed less severe crimes.

Erica Schmitt, a statistician who co-wrote the report, said research repeatedly has shown that released sex offenders tend to get arrested less often than those convicted of theft, robbery, stealing vehicles or illegal weapons trafficking. But a small core of sex offenders often commits similar crimes over and over, she said.

The study found 5.3 percent of sex offenders were arrested for another sex crime after their release.

The study was an outgrowth of a landmark project by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Released last year, it examined how often 272,111 prisoners set free in 1994 by 15 states, including Florida, ended up behind bars again within three years. Researchers did not include sex offender recidivism rates for individual states.

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